Sam's L33t Journal

Last weekend: BarCamp Boston (a tech unconference) was fun. Probably the sessions I got the most out of were a discussion of technical interviews, which prompted me to write this essay, and a workshop on public speaking by Eric Wei.

Last week: Work was very busy, but I made good progress on several things. I gave my presentation for QPX Training and got good feedback.

This weekend: Summery weather yesterday (the last for the year?). Had brunch on the patio at Neighborhood Restaurant and went to the Union Square Farmer's Market. There was a Yelp Somerville party at Brooklyn Boulders in the evening. Today, the weather turned cold. Broke my winter jacket out of storage and put some summer clothes away.

This week: Thursday and Friday I'll be attending the Google Cambridge Leadership Summit.

Next weekend: Julie's dad and sister and our niece will be in town!

Last weekend: BarCamp Boston, including a panel on ITA's new flexible database / screen-scraping framework, a panel on software for congressional redistricting (an important issue to pay attention to this year!), Wolfram's talk on Wolfram|Alpha, and a programming competition which I won somehow (make a tool in a language or framework you didn't know previously; I did a todo.txt CLI in Lua).

The Boston Marathon was evidently very exciting this year, with Robert Kiprono Cheruiyot of Kenya finishing in 2:05:52 (and under wind conditions that were not exceptionally good), breaking the previous course record set by Robert Kipkoech Cheruiyot of Kenya (not related). One older runner collapsed towards the end of the race, but survived without serious harm due to the timely intervention of bystanders.

Saw Kick-Ass with Film Club this Sunday. It was pretty much as expected from previews, which is to say I enjoyed it a lot, but it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea (not for kids, old people, those who don't really like the super-hero genre, and (probably) those unfamiliar with Watchmen). Also, as a not-quite-satire-of / response to Watchmen, it's rather clever.

In the middle of a few games, including Killer 7 (weird, Suda51 is some sort of genius but that doesn't make his work easily approachable) and Just Cause 2 (a sandbox game with an area hundreds of square miles large, with lots of parasailing and explosions). Still haven't started Sakura Wars.

Set up the Android client of Ushahidi for development on my machine so I can perhaps help with that.

Have games and movies on my shelf, TV shows I want to watch, programming to do, writing for this blog and for Evoke, books piling up in my room, Japanese to study.* Plans for every evening left this week, Boston Independent Film Festival this weekend. Getting to the gym, still need to get back to climbing on a regular basis.

* Is it possible to actually die of media overdose? If so, I'm worried.